Overview

FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature A kaleidoscopic debut collection of poems performing queer excess and lyric ecstasy. This flirty collection traces unruly paths of becoming; its sprawling poems build towards an expansive world celebrating fluidity while casting a critical lens on state power, ecological precarity, and the yearning for queer utopia on stolen land. Referencing lineages of poets, musicians, workers and neighbors, as well as conversations between lovers and friends, stemmy things is a vision unraveling, breaking open to make space for glimmering while reckoning with the body's multiple contexts. Layered, lush, and lavish, these poems offer up tangling, blossoming desire.

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9781643621500

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In imogen xtian smith's poetic imaginary, tears are phrased as genders. In other words, we can only hurt ourselves into reliable languaging. After all, I've never known a queer who didn't-in mulling over the body's horrific (and ecstatic) illegibility-find themself embroiled in the hellish, scrambling landscape of the word. As transsexual babes, then, we issue forth as alien encounters, both in embodied life and on the page. And so, stemmy things is that alien encounter. This collection is a velvet-draped gift, a study of queer morphology, a little gay edge. In poem after poem, smith lovingly mirrors back our impossible trans darkness. -Anais Duplan A fever dream of desire, trans/formation, and becoming. A reckoning of histories collapsing into the sweaty, sweet, peripatetic body of a poet who's ready to talk about now. Smith's stemmy things is for the mis-recognized and misunderstood, a guidebook of grounded and fertile imagination for the rigors of accountability and feeling. It is beautifully perverse self-care, wellness kink for girl they/thems. I argued with this book, cried with it, wrapped myself in its affirming queerness. It's a living thing. -Miguel Gutierrez stemmy things is for lovers: lovers of poetry and its history as a renegade art form, a queer go-to for the centuries. Reading imogen xtian smith deepens my belief that there are old souls - even Orlandos among us. I'm thinking of Woolf's proposition that poetry is a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice. In imogen's work, secrets are broadcast into the realm of the civic, where voices answer voices multitudinously, loving secrets and gossip but not so romantically as to accept the loneliness of staying underground. There is something about their sense of language that is so innovative, so curious, it feels unprecedented to me. Add to this, they are devoted to recording their queer trans femme life and times during late capitalism. I'm grateful for this record, this book, and to share time and space with this poet. -Stacy Szymaszek I've read many of these brilliant poems half a dozen times now and still find some unexpected texture, some slippery new layer at every turn. The magnificent imogen xtian smith sticks tongues and fingers in earholes, pigeon holes, rabbit holes, pillage holes- any holes that need feeling. These poems fill our vacancies with company, they fill our hollows with music. stemmy things is a verdant, fervid, worldly debut. It fills me with words. It fills me with feeling. It's extraordinary. -Terrance Hayes

Author Information

imogen xtian smith is a poet & performer. They live & work on Lenape lands / NYC.

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